Congratulations to Chris Granger on his successful Light Table IDE Kickstarter project proposal. It is inspirational. I find myself inordinately pleased that he didn't call it LightTable.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that it will be very useful for me or for people like me, programming in type-enabled languages like C++ and (one can hope) Clay, or even C, any time soon. Furthermore, the Java-world heritage implies a tolerance for the slow and stupid (e.g. Eclipse). There ought to be room for a complementary project tuned for those of us working with C++. To that end, I have registered luxmensa.org. (I suffer a fond delusion that Latin-geeks will admire the attempted pun.) The name is meant to imply a spin of the Light Table idea for Real Programmers. I'll hand the name over to anybody who can use it better than I can.

The problem, of course, is that your typical IDE is intolerable for anybody serious about working on code. Tiled windows? Mouse-based editing? Please. We need interaction with shell pipes, embedded editors including real emacs and vim, a deep awareness of git semantics, maybe auto-generating and auto-running of tests and micro-benchmarks of code fragments during editing. The useful features are those that make hard things easier, not those that make easy things mindless, or that automate what would best not be done at all.

Firefox still crashes regularly, but now less predictably. I sometimes wonder if it is AdBlock or NoScript that is responsible for the worst leaks, but I recover my wits quickly.